


Bucharest

by aurilly



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-18 19:49:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8173846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: Wolfgang seeks out Bucky for help.(Canon divergence partway through CA:CW)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [robaca (goodlamb)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodlamb/gifts).



When Bucky jogged into the lobby of his building, a man was standing in his way to the staircase. Slung over his left shoulder was Bucky's backpack. 

Bucky froze, all except his left hand, which flexed. No one knew where he lived, much less that the backpack lived under a floorboard. He wasn’t prepared for this. He was still processing and planning after seeing his picture on the cover of that newspaper. He tried to shift gears, to strategize about this new wrinkle in the larger crisis of the morning. 

The Soldier would have come up with a plan clearly, rationally, coldly, and quickly. But the Soldier hadn’t had backpacks. He hadn’t had valuables or sentiments to protect. This wasn’t a situation Hydra had trained him for, so Bucky grasped father back than that, all the way back to Brooklyn.

"Give me back my stuff,” he said, as he might have to a schoolyard bully. 

It had sounded less childish in his head. Bucky was geared up for a fight, but, surprisingly, the man tossed the bag to him, easy-peasy. 

Well, that crossed "emotional blackmail" off the list of possible things this guy wanted.

"They're coming for you.” 

"Who?" Bucky asked.

"Everyone."

Bucky stopped and listened—really listened, to the ambient noise he'd been painstaking taught to ignore except when it suited him. Listened to how the traffic patterns outside had slowed, as though to make room for unaccustomed large vehicles. And rubber-necking. Lots of rubber-necking. He heard—felt, almost—a whirring above. Helicopters. 

The man watched Bucky listen, and waited until he read the understanding on his face before continuing. "There is a service door that was boarded up years ago. We can escape through there. It leads to an alley, where there is an entrance to a sewer tunnel. From there we can swim downstream and evade them.”

Bucky already knew about the goddamn service door and the sewer tunnel. Of course he did. It was one of the reasons he'd chosen this apartment, this building. His only question was how this guy knew about them, too, and why he was here. The guy had a German accent, Bucky heard, despite the fluent English. Russian upbringing, from the very slight lilt in his voice. Interesting. Possibly Hydra. Possibly not.

"You say they're coming for me,” Bucky said. “But it looks to me like you've just gotten here first."

"I need information. I can't get it if you're in custody, or dead.”

No honeyed words, no sympathetic overtures. No extraneous words at all, Bucky noted (and appreciated). Only grim, practical, self-service. Bucky could buy that. 

"You have no reason to trust me. But you need to decide.” The man nodded towards the door. “We have only thirty seconds.”

Bucky listened again, triangulated and calculated. "No," he said, slinging his backpack on and fastening the strap. "I have ten."

He jumped towards the corner of the lobby where the wooden panel was. He would have used metal fingers, but the crowbar the guy had just slid out from under the stairs offered more leverage. Between the two of them, they had it open in three seconds, were through in two more, and had it swiftly replaced behind them, as though nothing had shifted, two seconds before they heard the paratroopers storm into the lobby. Bucky didn't wait to listen for whether the men tramped up the stairs, and, to his credit, neither did his new companion. He'd already removed his boots and begun tiptoeing towards the exit. 

Between their silent creeping, sloshing through the sewer tunnel, and then a swim along the sides of the river, coming up only very rarely for air, it was some time before they spoke again. Bucky had thought to escape by staying down longer and swimming faster, but this guy was some sort of fish, a natural in the water. He mostly kept up. Bucky couldn’t figure it out. He was too short to have gotten the serum. He looked fit, but entirely normal, driven purely by will, not synthetics. Maybe he really just liked being in the water.

Bucky surfaced and climbed up an embankment almost a mile downstream, outside the borders of the city. They’d swum far enough that the noise of the helicopters could no longer be heard. He immediately unslung one shoulder of his backpack to check what was in it and how bad the water damage was. Everything was in there—even things that had been strewn around the apartment. Moreover, it had all been wrapped in cellophane. There was no damage to his notebooks at all. The whole rescue-escape deal the guy had organized was more than considerate; it was well planned. Bucky had to appreciate that.

For this, and this alone, he decided to humor the guy. He opened his mouth to say thanks, but didn’t get a chance. Instead he got snapped at. 

"You should have followed my lead instead of taking this direction. I have a car on the opposite side of the city."

"Look, you said you needed some information. I'm letting you ask. And then I'm out." Humoring didn’t involve niceties, and it sure as hell didn’t involve sticking around long enough to get double-crossed. He could hotwire his own damn getaway car. 

"I’ve seen all the security footage and have a list of everyone who entered the UN complex yesterday. You’ve been here in Bucharest the entire time. I know you didn’t blow up that conference.”

“Do you now?” Bucky asked blandly, but he did wonder how the guy had gotten access to that kind of locked-down info.

“Even if you had done it, I wouldn’t care.”

"That’s nice. But I didn't ask if you would. What is it you _do_ care about?”

“I need to know about the freezing process. I need to know how it works, and where I can find a facility. I need to know how dangerous the process is and what the risks are.”

Bucky had expected questions about one of his kills, about sensitive diplomatic information that should have died with Hydra but was still alive in him. He hadn’t expected this.

“What do you want to know for?”

“A friend,” the man said, though from the way his tongue tripped on the word, Bucky wasn’t sure he quite believed it, or else it wasn’t exactly the right word to use. “Freezing might be the only way to save him. To save all of… my friends.”

“Friends don’t freeze friends. If you care about this guy at all, freezing isn’t anything you want for him. Trust me.”

The guy reached into his pocket, and Bucky reflexively backed up. But all he took out was a photograph, wrapped in cellophane like all the stuff in the backpack. He held it up in front of Bucky’s face.

“You know this man, don’t you?”

Bucky recoiled. Yeah, he knew him. You didn’t forget the faces of men who had… This wasn’t a guy anyone would easily forget. 

“How do you know I know him?”

“He goes by different names, but I have… friends…” Again, that word, a word that didn’t sound quite right. “…who know how to decipher encryption and find information people want hidden. He was mentioned, by another name, by multiple names, in the files that Black Widow released to the public. He worked for Hydra, which owned a number of subsidiary shell companies and experimental research organizations. He still works for one of them. You know BPO?”

Bucky nodded. Yeah, he knew BPO. He’d done a couple of missions for BPO—on the orders of this asshole, actually. He had been instrumental in stepping up Bucky’s torture, fine-tuning the brainwashing, and trying to turn Bucky into something even more pliant after Hydra had transferred him to the American cell. 

“You’re saying this guy got to your friend?” Bucky asked. He swallowed, because he knew, even if only from an outsider’s perspective, what that meant.

The man nodded. “He did. And until this man is dead, my friend cannot think. He cannot speak. He cannot even know where he is. Or I, and everyone I care about, is dead. Do you have any idea what I mean?”

Bucky nodded. The others… the ones who had gotten the serum in 1991. They had been different. They had had a connection to one another that Bucky could not share. They were more dangerous together than Bucky had been, and it was because of this. It was because of this that they’d been chosen to receive Howard’s new serum in the first place. And now Bucky had an inkling why these 'friends' didn't sound like friends. The man standing in front of him, and the guy he was talking about... they were in each other's heads, shared that connection Bucky had never understood. Now, finally, Bucky saw the full scale of the problem here.

“How’s your friend keeping the doctor… How’s he keeping him out of his head?”

“Drugs. Lots of drugs, all the time. One of my other... friends...” And here he looked pained all of a sudden, like he was breaking from strain. "She is a chemist. But no one can live like that. No one should. So I thought—we thought—if he could become like you, and sleep until we take care of it… If you help us, we can provide the evidence we have to clear your name, tell the world you were not responsible for this bomb.”

Bucky was getting twitchy. He was interested now, less concerned with his name (which had been deservedly black long before Vienna) than about anyone who might fall prey to Doctor Matheson, or whatever his name was these days. This German guy seemed on the level. Dangerous and ruthless and therefore easier for Bucky, as he was these days, to understand. But he didn’t like standing here, out in the open, by the quay. They were a mile away from the paratroopers, but it wasn’t far enough. 

“Can we talk about this elsewhere? I’ll take care of the car. I just gotta…”

The man nodded. “You will help?”

“When you first started asking me, I was gonna tell you there was nothing worse in the world than the tank, but this guy? He’s it. He’s worse. Plus, you wrapped my shit in cellophane. That gets you a lot of points.”

The man smiled, and all the naked relief that suddenly shone from his wet face made him look younger, friendlier. “I’m Wolfgang,” he said, and stuck out a hand.

“Bucky. Nice to meet you. Now, let’s get out of here. I'll drive.”

Wolfgang smiled grimly. “Actually, you might want to let me.”


End file.
